Taittinger, Comtes de Champagne Rose 2011

Beautiful orange-cherry color, exuding aromas of dried flowers, cherry stones, wild strawberries, cloves and cinnamon pastries. It’s medium-bodied with excellent weight and balance. Soft bubbles. Layers of soft, supple berry fruit. Pastries and walnuts come through on a seamless finish. Drink or hold.

Disgorged in October 2022, the 2011 Brut Comtes de Champagne Rosé is a blend of 40% Chardonnay and 60% Pinot Noir, including fully 14% of red wine that lends it notable depth of color this year. Evoking aromas of cherries, buttery pastry, raspberries and tangerine, with an attractive minty top note, the bouquet is complex and incipiently spicy. Medium to full-bodied, layered and vinous, with chalky structuring extract, it concludes with a long, sapid finish. The limitations of the vintage mean that this is a giving, rather open-knit Comtes Rosé, but it is nevertheless a great effort in a challenging year and exhibits none of the herbaceous qualities that mar some of the wines produced in this year. Drink it now and over the next decade.

The 2011 Rosé Comtes de Champagne is soft, forward and open-knit, all of which make it a fine choice for drinking now and over the next handful of years. Sweet dried cherry, tobacco, mint, cedar and crushed flowers give this mid-weight Rosé lovely aromatic complexity. There are no hard edges or angular contours. Even so, I would prefer to drink the 2011 sooner rather than later, as it is a bit lacking in depth. The blend is 60% Chardonnay and 40% Pinot Noir (including 16% still Pinot from Bouzy).